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Message from discussion PROGN considered intrusive?
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Martti Halminen  
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 More options Mar 21 1999, 3:00 am
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: Martti Halminen <m...@dpe.rm_spam_trap.fi>
Date: 1999/03/21
Subject: Re: PROGN considered intrusive?
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Erik Naggum wrote:

>   there have been strong arguments against IF (and WHEN and UNLESS) here
>   and elsewhere, and they continue to baffle me.

Either you are referring to a longer time than I've been reading c.l.l,
or you are reading some statements in some newbie threads more seriously
than I did.

> today, it dawned on me
>   that maybe what people actually don't like is PROGN.  

Last I checked, WHEN and UNLESS had implicit PROGN, so
if anybody has a problem with them, it's probably not the same as with
IF.

<snip>

>   so instead of the standard Common Lisp

> (if (foo)
>     (progn
>       (then-1)
>       (then-2))
>   (progn
>     (else-1)
>     (else-2)))

>   we could have

> (if (foo)
>     {(then-1)
>      (then-2)}
>   {(else-1)
>    (else-2)})

Personally I dislike this idea due to bad readability: with my bad
eyesight the difference between () and {} is too small to be easily
distinguishable in the standard fonts used on this machine. (yeah, I
know I should get new glasses...)

>   do people actually think PROGN is intrusive and a waste of space?  would
>   using a short-hand like {} work as well to reduce "noise" as using '
>   instead of a QUOTE form does?  and does this make more sense than IF*?

Whenever the PROGNs start to annoy me, I find myself converting the code
to use COND or CASE, instead of IF. As I often write stuff with multiple
branches, anyway, I don't have major problems with that.

--


 
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